Q: We went HTTPS and traffic dipped — turned out it was mixed content. How bad was the recovery?

Q: We went HTTPS and traffic dipped — turned out it was mixed content. How bad was the recovery?

Reassuring story here, because this scares people.

Short answer: fully recoverable, usually inside a month.

Long answer: a publisher moved to HTTPS but ~30% of pages still loaded images and one script over http://. Browsers showed "not secure," and Google was indexing both versions. Organic clicks fell 22% over three weeks. We fixed it by rewriting internal asset URLs to protocol-relative, adding HSTS, and 301-ing every http page to https. We did NOT add the http property to GSC and stress over it.

Clicks returned to baseline in 26 days, then climbed 8% above the old level — because duplicate http/https versions stopped splitting signals.

Next step: open any page, check the browser console for "mixed content" warnings, and force every asset to load over https before blaming rankings.